[lug] Introduction

[Nathan England]

Hello Hello,

I am a 32 year old PHP developer and LAMP administrator. I have been using 
Linux since I got my first pc. My parents thought it good for me to learn how 
to use a computer and bought me a Compaq Presario with Windows 3.1 and DOS 5 
or 6 for my birthday. My elementary school used Apple's, so it became 
immediately clear to me that there must be a variety of operating systems 
available for a computer. So I hopped on yahoo and began looking through the 
categories and found computers / operating systems and something new that had 
just come about a couple months before called slackware! Not knowing what I 
was doing, I downloaded a bunch of diskette images and rawrite, wrote all the 
images to I believe 11 or 14 diskettes and never looked back...

Okay, not quite so easy. I think I made it through about half the disks, maybe 
the a package and then I hit a bad diskette. So I had to reload windows from 
my Presario recovery cds and download the images again and write them to some 
new floppies. I don't think I slept at all that night, 14.4 modems were 
awesome!!!

Since then things have changed a lot, thankfully! I have spent my years 
tinkering around with Ubuntu, Fedora and *SUSE* in all its incarnations, but 
used Slackware for most of those years. Eventually I switched to archlinux 
about 6 years ago, but as of the last few years I have been managing my own 
distro using my own package system. I prefer stability of most of the system 
yet I want bleeding edge on some of it, such as kdevelop. I don't like having 
to upgrade a ton of stuff, just because a new version was released, only so I 
can keep current with kdevelop and a few other apps, rolling my own fit my 
needs best.

I've never been much of a GNOME person. The early days had such horrific 
memory problems that it put a sour taste in my mouth that even today I cannot 
shake. GNOME 2 is great, I despise GNOME 3 and Unity, but I am very happy with 
KDE 4.7.3.

I look forward to lots of questions and answers on this group, and many 
interesting discussions. I am searching for a real "community" to be a part of 
that is actually Linux oriented.

Nathan